Month: December 2016

2016 has been a hectic yet productive year. Our regular interventions in the brick kilns to improve working equines welfare continued this year as well. We worked in 12 brick factories of Lalitpur. It is heartening to see a massive change in the attitude of the equine owners in the way they treat their animals. Realizing the value of their animals and their contribution for their daily lives is now well understood.

Animal Nepal also decided to expand our work to include the mountain mules and for this purpose we did an assessment of the situation at Gorkha and Dhading and organized stakeholder meetings with the owners of the mules. We also published a report on the situation of mountain mules and we hope to use this as a base to design interventions for our work. We have continued to train our stakeholders on making improved harnesses and simple wound management.

We have also helped register an equine user group which will ensure that they are able to fight for their own rights as workers in the brick industry. We have also initiated a micro credit and saving programme for the equine users group.

Animal Nepal attended the Barabanki Equine fair in India which was a great learning experience for the entire team and I Would like to thank The Donkey Sanctuary UK for continuing to support all our initiatives and this visit.

The most important achievement was the formulation of a working animal’s guideline by the government of Nepal which is in the process of being endorsed and which we hope to be able to implementing the coming year.

Under the humane dog management Programme, we initiated spay/neuter and treatment programme for Lumbini. We hope to continue our work at the birth place of the lord Buddha, the epitome of compassion. And all these was possible through our partnership with Lumbini Social Service Foundation and specially Venerable Metteya who has also started a small sanctuary for needy animals and we were really happy to be part of his first horse rescue.

Under our ongoing programme at Lalitpur and Kirtipuir we are happy to say that we managed to spay and neuter xxxx dogs. We also conducted a CNVR camp at Godavari and Pharping. Vaccination camps were held at Chobar, Jalbinayak and Swyambhu and on World Spay Day we organized a special programme at ….. and spayed 40 dogs. A total of xxxx dogs were treated, xxxx adopted and xxxx were rescued.

In 2017 we intend to work with dog breeders and pet shop owner as the market is being flooded with puppies of different breeds and we are also seeing an increase in the number of pets that are abandoned on the streets. We hope to be able to educate the public about responsible pet ownership and the breeder and pet shop owners about responsible breeding. We also hope to work with the government to come up with breeding standards. We plan to intensively work with community and students to promote animal welfare issues.

Animal Nepal has managed to strengthen our advocacy programme. In this respect, we organized a consultative meeting on animal welfare law review campaigned against cruel buffalo transportation, published a report on national and international legal instruments addressing animal welfare in Nepal, hired a new advocacy officer and are proud to have been a part of a process whereby Tiger tops private limited, one of the oldest resorts in Nepal decided to adopt responsible elephant tourism by going chain free and ending elephant polo. All this work would not have been possible without the continued faith and support of our work by our donors (names of donors). A heartfelt thank you to our great team at Animal Nepal, Your confidence dedication and professionalism is what inspires me to continue thinking of expanding our work.